We'll Shine
by The Carnivorous Muffin
Summary: After a thousand years and the end of the world, Death steps off the train and into a Hogwarts that isn't Hogwarts at all. One that already has another Death inside it. Sequel of sorts to "My Immortal Lily and the Art of Bringing Me to Life" and crossover with "October"


**Author's Note: To those about to embark on this strange journey I offer warnings. First, this is a sequel of sorts to "My Immortal Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" which is a crossover with "My Immortal" and "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" and in this case is a crossover with "October". So, if you haven't read things, you'll probably be confused. It's also NOT CANON.**

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"Bastard!"

The first thing he became aware of, as he stepped off the train beyond life and death and into some plane beyond the mortal one he'd left behind, was that there was blood dripping down his shirt.

Looking down, on the tiled floor, there was a single overturned bowl with clotted blood and small clumps of what looked like human tissue trickling away from the fallen dishware and towards his leather shoes. Only, at a closer look, the tissue might not be human viscera at all but instead small congealed clumps of blood-soaked cereal.

Then there was noise, the noise of so very many people, far too many people when opposed to the deathly quiet that had been those final years in the universe when the last of humanity had killed itself. The chattering of students, the sights and sounds, he realized with sudden alarm, of Hogwarts.

He looked down at his clothes, those shoes were the kind of shoes he'd worn in Hogwarts, he knew that worn leather. Except the clothes were not the Hogwarts uniform, instead he was in strange loose pants that were so baggy they were threatening to slide down to his knees, and a dark shirt that was three sizes too large.

He looked up, in front of him was a girl, around sixteen or so, with pale blue eyes and long dark hair who might have been quite beautiful if it weren't for the white makeup lathered on her face, the strange thick eyeliner, and the entirely too tight-fitting dress.

All the same, with sudden embarrassment, he realized that it must have been her cereal, "I'm so sorry."

Suddenly the girl's anger disappeared and she looked… She looked as if he wasn't out of place at all, as if he, the man with no name that fit anymore, belonged here inside Hogwarts just as much as anyone else did, "That's alright. What's your name?"

He opened his mouth, closed it, even as the girl smiled at him as if she knew something he didn't, "Let me guess, most people call you Vampire, don't they?"

"What?"

"Because you love the taste of human blood," the girl finished with a smile, her own teeth, he realized suddenly pointed as a vampire's would be.

His mouth opened in horror, he took an uncomfortable step back, but before he could say anything, he felt a hand on his arm and found himself looking at a face that was horrifyingly familiar, "Mother?"

No, but so close, so horrifyingly close to Lily Evans it was like a dagger in his heart. This girl's hair was too thick and curly, like his father's hair rather than his mother, but it was his mother's face and eyes staring back out of him out of that too pale skin. Her hand gripped his arm so tightly that it hurt.

"Uncle Death," the girl whispered in his ear, "What in the hell are you doing here now? Come with me, we don't have much time."

He was pulled then, away from the vampire posing as a school girl and with the girl who was not his mother, and swiftly out of the great hall altogether. She was wearing clothing he was more familiar with, the kind of clothing he'd always gotten handed down from Dudley, late twentieth century second-hand muggle clothing. Muggleborn, poor, and for some reason not in her Hogwarts uniform and not heckled for it either.

Then again, she didn't seem the type to be heckled.

She oozed a strange sort of confidence and charisma, the kind that made Tom Riddle's carefully crafted person seem like a pale shadow. The way she walked, the way those unnaturally green eyes burned, it wasn't simply that you couldn't question but her but that in the very face of her all questions disappeared.

She didn't stop until they were out on the Hogwarts grounds, one hand held above her head to wordlessly provide them a shield from the relentless sleet pounding into the ground, and finally at the edge of the water she turned to look at him.

"Why would you ever come to this godforsaken place?"

He opened his mouth, closed it, and finally said with a note of alarm, "Normally I'm the one who makes the cryptic statements no one likes."

The girl didn't laugh, she just continued to stare at him, curling hair flying about in the wind and the force of her own overwhelming magic. What was she? What was this place? He didn't know what he had expected on stepping onto the train and off of it but this place was…

"Congratulations, Death," the girl said, a smile curling onto her lips, "You've just entered the seventh layer of hell, the Hotel California as I like to call it, where you can always checkout but never truly leave."

"What?"

She rubbed at her forehead, lifting red hair away to reveal, to his surprise and horror, a scar in the shape of a lighting bolt, "Right, you don't know yet… It's not Hogwarts, it may look like Hogwarts, it may even sound like Hogwarts on occasion, but it's not Hogwarts and don't ever forget it."

"That scar," he said, unable to help himself, pointing at it, "Where did you—"

The girl paid no mind to his question, instead just looked at him flatly and began listing off information, "Pay attention, this may just save your life. Your name here, for the record, is Harry Potter but you go by Vampire because you like the taste of human blood. You used to date Draco Malfoy and were delightfully homosexual but recently you've discovered you're more of a bisexual creature but only when Enoby Dark'ness Dementia Way is involved. Draco is currently dating Enoby, by the way, it's great. There's a Good Charlotte concert that gets infested by the Death Dealers every other day or so, I lose track, and whatever you do make fun of some poor girl named Brittany."

She stopped, crossed her arms and gave him an assessing look, "Any questions?"

"Who are you?"

The girl paused, looked at him closer, a wary edge entering her eyes now. Those eyes, he suddenly realized, that were not his mother's at all but his unnerving eyes. The eyes he'd had only after he'd accepted that Harry Potter had never been real in the first place.

"What are you?" he breathed, but he didn't need to ask, he already knew exactly what she was.

She started to walk away, as if by that very question he had somehow given her more information than she wanted, and he had to cry out and reach for her, "Wait! Please, you're Harry Potter, aren't you? Harry Potter too, I mean, only that name never fit you at all and you're—"

"Memory loss," the girl said slowly, voice quiet and barely audible above the pounding rain, "Is one of the first symptoms of goffism."

"What?"

She looked at him and she looked…

God, she looked heartbroken. She looked as if he'd reached into her chest, pulled out her still-beating heart, and forced her to watch as he ate it in front of her. Except she smiled, a bitter, too sad thing.

"You know, Death, I missed you so much. Maybe even more than Lenin, sometimes, I've missed you."

He couldn't help but laugh, hold a hand to his face as he took in the girl that was, god did this make her his sister?

"Now I know what it's like," he confessed, "To talk to me, god, it's so confusing."

She laughed in turn, threw her head back and laughed in a way that he hadn't in thousands of years. She was him, he realized, but somehow not, for all that she knew what he was and she was she had not yet truly become him.

"You really aren't fully Vampire yet," the girl noted, this time her smile turning into something truer, "Are you?"

She then looped her arm through his, guided him back to the castle, "Well, I can't say I'm glad you're here, this really is Hell you know, but all the same it's been—Well, it's been a while since I've had any company that's not a Satanist."

He laughed again, unable to help it, the delightful bubbling laughter that he'd somehow found someone who understood and yet he could hardly understand at all.

"Oh, you're laughing now, but I'm perfectly serious," the girl said, "Just wait until you meet B'loody Mary Queen of Goffs, then we'll see who's laughing."

"And what do I call you?" he asked as they stepped back into the warm, dry corridor.

"As always," the girl said fondly, as if he truly was the greatest of friends she'd ever had and that she had missed him, "You can call me Lily."

Lily, as she called herself, apparently knew quite a bit about this strange alternate Hogwarts he'd found himself in despite not being from this dimension either.

"Honestly, I have no idea," she confessed as they entered their first class after Breakfast, Potions, without anyone in the classroom asking who he was or how he'd gotten here, "One morning Ebony Way shows up at breakfast, tells us all she's a vampire witch in a band, and then the next thing I know Dumbledore has a headache and Snape is banging Loopin in the hallway."

He couldn't have heard that right, except she didn't give him time to think or ask for clarification because she sighed and summarized, "And that's how I ended up in this place, with all of these… people."

"But it wasn't always like…" he trailed off, motioned to their surroundings, to the odd collection of students he'd found himself with. Granted, it had been a very long time since he'd stepped inside Hogwarts, but he didn't remember it looking quite like this. Gone were the Hogwarts uniforms, gone was any hint of a Hogwarts house at all, instead there were the strange baggy black wearing students sitting on the opposite side of the room from pink polo wearing students.

The girl, Lily, sat in the middle of them looking all the more like a stranger in a strange land.

"God no," the girl said, "I mean, don't get me wrong, it was always Hogwarts but it wasn't… this place."

"You sound like you've been here a long time," he noted slowly and the girl gave him a pitying look.

"It loops," she said gravely.

"It loops?"

"Not consistently, not in any sort of definable pattern, but you'll be walking down the halls and suddenly you'll find yourself at the Good Charlotte concert again or else at the breakfast where Vampire Potter makes an appearance. This place isn't linear, it's part of the reason there's no real escape."

She sighed, looked down at her potion, and with a shrug said, "I personally try to make the best of it. It's the most I really can do in this place, and, well, you'll get used to it."

"Vampire Potter, you motherfucker!"

The girl from breakfast, Ebony Way, pointed an accusing finger at him with death in those pale blue eyes.

"Well, except for this part," Lily said hurridly, putting a comforting hand on his shoulder, "Brace yourself, you're about to see more of Draco Malfoy than you ever wanted to see in your life."

He was about to ask what she meant when he saw for himself, there, without a single speck of clothing on him, was what looked like a sixteen-year-old Draco Malfoy stalking into the Potions classroom after Ebony Way without an ounce of shame in him.

"Ebony, it's not what you think!"

He felt his jaw fall open as his eyes couldn't help but trail down and see exactly what a sixteen-year-old Draco Malfoy would have had to offer him back in his good old schoolboy days.

It was horrifying, he couldn't help but think, but there was some appeal.

"What is it you desire, you ridiculous dimwit?!" Snape asked Malfoy, causing Death's head to whip towards the man in complete confusion, as even though it was Malfoy who had never been docked a point in his life from Snape he surely couldn't…

"Right, get used to that bit too," Lily explained, "Snap's been eaten by the brain worms, best not to pay it much mind. Just never be alone in a room with him or he will try to ritualistically rape you."

"What?" he tried to ask but it was too late, the girl, Ebony, was already speaking to him again.

She looked at him as if he had committed the largest of betrayals, as if the knife he'd plunged into her back was still warm in his hands, "Vampire, I can't believe you cheated on me with Draco!"

"Cheated on you with—" he spluttered but Draco was now talking over him, not even giving him a chance to catch his breath.

"I don't know why Ebony is so mad at me," Draco said, not to him, to Vampire, but instead to the entire Potion's classroom even with his family jewels exposed and dangling between his pale legs, "I had went out with Vampire, I'm bi and so is Ebony, for a while, but then he broke my heart!"

Draco pointed a finger at Death, tears in his eyes, as he hissed out, "He dumped me because he liked Brittany, that stupid preppy fucker!"

Before he could even think of defending himself Draco was turning back to Ebony Way, "We were just good friends now, he had gone through horrible problems, and now he was gothic. Ha ha, like I would hang out with a prep!"

"But I—" Death stood, started, then stopped, unsure what to say or what was even happening. Lily put a comforting hand on his shoulder and finished the sentence for him, "But Vampire isn't going out with Draco anymore."

Ebony apparently didn't believe this, instead she stomped her foot on the floor and screamed, "Yeah fucking right! Fuck off, you bastard!"

And just like that she stormed out of the room from whence she came leaving the rest of them to stare after her.

"I wish I could say that was the last time you'll see Malfoy's ferrety balls," Lily commented next to him as she consolingly patted him on the shoulder, "Unfortunately, it is not."

"And there's no escape," he asked.

His bed was next to hers in the Slytherin dormitory, Lily somehow breaking the rules to bring a man into her private room, and as sad it was he appreciated that. She wasn't familiar and yet she somehow was, more familiar than anything he'd seen in so very long, and it was worrying how much he appreciated that.

She called this place hell, and that may be so, but he had never had a sister before now.

For now they both stared at the ceiling, beds pressed together, taking in the events of the day and planning out for the never-ending tomorrow in a world that seemed to be sinking back into a metaphorical swamp.

"I think I managed it once," Lily confessed, "There was a time, after Ebony died, that I… I went somewhere else, somewhere beyond this place and all other places. Something called me back though, maybe it was you."

"I'm sorry," he said, but she smiled and shook her head.

"Don't be," she said, and it was kind, kinder than he deserved, "I would have come back for Lenin, if he was still here, of course I'd come back for you."

"You talk like you know me," he said slowly, "Have we ever truly met?"

She pursed her lips, looking him over, "I don't know, I thought I did, but it's hard to tell in this place."

Softly he repeated her words back to her, staring into her eyes which were mirrors of his own, "You said memory's the first thing to go."

"Well," the girl said with a healthy pause, "I said that, but really everything's the first thing to go. One moment you're fine and in the next blink of an eye you're Snap."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that."

She reached over, grabbed his hand in hers. Hers was warm, soft and feminine in a way that his were not, and when she looked over at him, he could swear there was a star burning brightly inside of her soul, "We'll get out, together. I've done it before and I can do it again. I promise, Death, that together, someday, we'll shine."

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**Author's Note: Written for the 1100th review of "When Harry Met Tom" where Shadowclonier asked for Azrael from "October" to make an appearance in "My Immortal" and I figured that was a good time to bring back poor Lily trapped in that hell. Since, you know, I've already been down the "My Immortal" road.**

**Thanks for reading, reviews are much appreciated.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter**


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